What Collided with Venus? Move along, nothing to see here.

[Geomartian]

The Albedo of Venus is greater than 70 percent.

From Radiation in the Atmosphere of Venus Dmitry V. Titov etal. http://lasp.colorado.edu/~espoclass/ASTR_5835_2015_Readings_Notes/Titov_Et_Al-EVTP.pdf

The total solar flux at the Venus orbit is 2622 ± 6 W/m2 (Moroz et al., 1985). Due to its high albedo the planet absorbs only 157 ± 6 W/m2 on average, less than that deposited on Earth (~240 W/m2), despite the fact that Venus is 30% closer to the Sun.

The measured data for the infrared energy being emitted from Venuses nightside appears to be vague, dissembling, and is probably completely fictitious. Likely the raw and uninterpreted data would show that the heat is radiating from the nightside planetary surface and not from Venuses atmosphere.

The greenhouse model has no relevance regarding the surface temperature of Venus. A geologically recent collision with a massive object (interstellar?) caused Venus to revert to a completely molten state. Today we are seeing a cooling planet whose surface temperature is still too high to allow it to form an atmosphere having a normal density.

Why didn’t NASA and other scientific organizations just report these plainly visible and scientifically consistent facts?

Whose agenda was being advanced by scientific gaslighting on a planetary scale?

This conspiracy was not about global warming. That would come along later.

According to Houston, NASA, and the United States Geological Survey nothing from outside of this Solar System has ever affected the Earth or the other planets.

Except for those interstellar events (impacts) which created the geological conditions for oil and other valuable ore deposits. The oil capitol of world (Houston) not affecting the science in the least bit.

It appears that Mars (northern hemisphere disrupted and melted) and Venus (destroyed and rendered incapable of supporting life) had impacts or collisions in the geologically recent past (<500 million years ago).

(speculation) Under the category of “Can this get any better?” What if this destruction was contemporaneous?

What if one of Earth’s extinction level events had occurred within this crowded time frame?

Either impact event (Mars or Venus) would have filled the inner Solar System with lots of debris.

Does anybody have any questions? (not involving psychiatry )

 

[Helio]

From Radiation in the Atmosphere of Venus Dmitry V. Titov etal. http://lasp.colorado.edu/~espoclass/ASTR_5835_2015_Readings_Notes/Titov_Et_Al-EVTP.pdf
...
The greenhouse model has no relevance regarding the surface temperature of Venus. A geologically recent collision with a massive object (interstellar?) caused Venus to revert to a completely molten state. Today we are seeing a cooling planet whose surface temperature is still too high to allow it to form an atmosphere having a normal density.

The referenced paper argues strongly for greenhouse effects with no mention of heat from any impact, that I could see in the paper. Why do you suggest impact heating?

 

[Catastrophe]

You will be hard pressed to find anything in the Solar System which has not had a major collision.

Mercury - mostly core remains
Venus - abnormal rotation
Earth - formation of Moon etc

Cat

 

[Geomartian]

Why would the carbon recycling fail on a planet?

As Venus gets hotter from the greenhouse effect the atmosphere particularly the CO2 would react with the surface rock producing carbonates. This would pull CO2 and other atmospheric gases out of the atmosphere, reducing the pressure and increasing the transparency of the atmosphere. That is a key principle within greenhouse regulation.

Venus has a highly reactive atmosphere that should be attacking the surface rocks vigorously. The problem is that the surface temperature is too high for the products of that chemical reaction to remain stable. At high temperatures carbonates break down into metal oxides and CO2.

How did Venuses atmosphere get so hot if the planets surface is supposed to be less than 200c?

 

[Catastrophe]

"How did Venuses atmosphere get so hot if the planets surface is supposed to be less than 200c? "

It is way hotter than that. About 460 C if I remember correctly.

Cat

 

[IG2007]

Geomartian, you are forgetting the fact that there used to be, and there are still a few, active (if Wikipedia is right) volcanoes on Venus. This simple fact should answer all your questions.

 

[Geomartian]

"How did Venuses atmosphere get so hot if the planets surface is supposed to be less than 200c? "

It is way hotter than that. About 460 C if I remember correctly.

Cat

The surface is hot because it all lava. Venus had originally cooled down and had a thick crust and possibly an ocean. The collision reset the clock and the conditions we currently see on Venus have nothing to do with the greenhouse effect.

 

[Geomartian]

Geomartian, you are forgetting the fact that there used to be, and there are still a few, active (if Wikipedia is right) volcanoes on Venus. This simple fact should answer all your questions.

The current conditions on Venus are not normal. Venuses atmosphere should be hotter than Earth’s but the average crustal surface temperature should be about the same. Except that it is not.

Without plate tectonics Venus should be cooler and geologically static. Being slightly smaller it should have cooled down faster than Earth.

A collision has caused Venus to totally melt down producing a surface temperature which is too high for the atmospheric reactions with the surface rocks to remain stable. No atmospheric reduction will occur until the surface temperature drops far enough for the reaction products to be stable.

What we are seeing on Venus is not a runaway greenhouse effect since that process has not even started up yet.

If Venus is radiating considerably more energy than it is receiving then it is too hot from an event so recent that it hasn’t reached equilibrium.

 

[Geomartian]

If the only mass which was storing heat was the atmosphere then you should see significant cooling at the surface on the night side. A night which is something like 58 days long.

Instead, you only see a temperature change in the upper atmosphere. The surface remains hot.

Again, if the planet is radiating more heat than it receives that should have clearly shown up in the probe data. My guess is that it did show up and NASA used Nobel prize winners to explain it away.

You would have to be an idiot to think otherwise.

Social pressure and group think works just as well for suppressing unwanted science as guns or money.

 

[Dragrath]

Hmm Well the paper linked doesn't really address this question but I have read literature back when working on a term paper last spring which which using more complex models has shown cloud feedbacks and oceans can keep the planets state from reaching a greenhouse state if Venus ever formed Oceans. WE generally have reason to believe Venus once had a similar amount of water to Earth because Venus and Earth have similar Nitrogen and carbon budgets and enstatite chondrite meteorites which are now thought to be the source material from the inner planets are sufficiently water rich to provide Earth with her Oceans without external water sources.

Venus: The Atmosphere, Climate, Surface, Interior and Near-Space Environment of an Earth-Like Planet - Space Science Reviews

This is a review of current knowledge about Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour and near twin, Venus. Such knowledge has recently been extended by the European Venus Express and the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around the planet; these missions and their achievements are concisely...

link.springer.com

The nature of what was responsible for resurfacing Venus is still unknown but there does seem to be some evidence for something catastrophic around 750± 250 Million Years ago as age estimates have been revised older due to the realization that Venus's atmosphere prevents most asteroids from leaving craters at all and the evidence of active ongoing volcanism.

This is a wide range poorly constrained by the lack of geophysical samples of Venus which makes it tough to say anything conclusively.

Now Venus is losing more heat than it receives from the Sun due to its extreme albedo as well as losing its atmosphere slowly to solar wind erosion which is additional potential support for a cataclysmic resurfacing but the nature of this is again highly unconstrained which makes it hard to make any conclusive conjectures over what may have happened here.

Now I have noticed that the range listed falls right around a very interesting period on Earth namely the onset of the Sturtian glaciation the first and most extreme of the Cryogenian snowball Earths as well as a potential clustering of large craters on the Moon though those dates have been called into question due to the potential for contamination of material from Copernicus.

Based on the observations of Kepler and its successor TESS of what appear to be large dust clouds that block a substantial amount of sunlight with amounts consistent with terrestrial planetary scale impacts it is reasonable to suppose a potential Collison may have occurred on Venus subsequently spreading large amounts of impact ejecta and potentially blocking significant amounts of sunlight which could in principal justify the initiation of the Cryogenian glaciations on Earth.


This hypothesis is not without issues however the most obvious being the low probability that a large impactor could remain so late in the solar system.


That said I do have a pet model which could explain the late impact source of such an impactor as well as the planets highly unusual rotation it only requires that Venus once had its own large moon.

I came up with this idea 2 years ago in my planetary physics class when we were discussing the effective factors of tides on exchanging angular momentum between a planet and its satellite. Tidal forces reach an equilibrium when the planet and its moon have equalized their relative orbital angular momentum and day lengths such that both become synchronously locked. Noting that tidal forces are dependent on the change of the gravitational force experienced by two bodies (i.e. derivative of the gravitational force) this results in a tidal force proportional to (M_p * M_m )/r^3 meaning that compared to gravity this has a much stronger dependence on radius.

Recall the Venus is closer to the Sun plus that the Hill sphere of a planet also shrinks with proximity to the star, this means that the rate of tidal evolution is accelerated the closer a planet is to its host star. Furthermore liquid water thanks to its hydrogen bonds has a remarkable effect of amplifying tidal forces based on the number of molecules which are bound to each other by hydrogen bonds within a body of water. This would play a critical role in accelerating the time evolution of tidal angular momentum exchanges between Venus its moon and the Sun.

The details depend on the initial masses and the planet and Moons original rotational and orbital angular momentum but as a broad role For prograde planetary rotation if a planets Moon has an orbital period longer than the planets day the moon will recede from the planet and the planet will slow down its rotation until the angular momentum of each becomes in balance or if the moon's orbital period is shorter than the planets day it will result in the moon's orbital distance(semi major axis) approaching the planet and speeding up the planets day. On the other hand for a moon orbiting retrograde(which incidentally results in far more distant allowable orbits than for a prograde moon) both worlds angular momentums will slowly "cancel out" involving the planet's rotation and the Moon's orbital period decreasing.

For this hypothesis it is the retrograde moon scenario that offers the greatest explanatory power as it also enables us to potentially explain one of Venus's most peculiar feature its retrograde day that is longer than a Venusian year.

The way this works is fairly straight forward using the principals of angular momentum exchange. First lets assume Venus during the solar system's chaotic early days over 4 billion years ago captured a large planetesimal in a retrograde orbit. Now how this system begin to evolve depends on a lot of conditions such as Venus's composition atmosphere and whether it had oceans but the general principal is that the tidal influences of the Moon and the Sun would both act in concert to slow the revolution period of Venus's day. The solar effect would continue slowing the planets day up until the length of a Venusian day became equal to that of its year at this point the solar tide would begin to counteract the further slowing of Venus's day keeping Venus synchronously locked to the Sun. Modeling has supported the possibility that Venus if it had Earthlike Oceans could have been synchronously locked to the sun in as little as 250 Million years depending on initial conditions so it is reasonable to assume this tidal evolution to synchronous rotation would occur fairly early in the planets evolution. The Moon however would naturally continue approaching Venus over the next 3 billion years until it finally passes within Venus's Roche limit at this point it would be ripped apart into a retrograde ring which would fall onto the planet transferring the Moons remaining retrograde angular momentum. The planets surface would readily be melted under the infalling bombardment re-volatilizing any carbon locked way in the planets crust and vaporizing the planets oceans into a highly dense atmosphere of raining molten rock and gasses with likely much of the material getting lost into space where it would be able to gradually cool and block a significant fraction of the Sun's light possibly triggering global glaciations or at least significantly cooler periods on other bodies within the solar plane.

The end result is the Venusian hellscape we see today with the retrograde rotation dense super rotating atmosphere and hot surface. Additionally any unlikeliness of this scenario could potentially be accounted for by the anthropic principal if the Cryogenian glaciations played an important role in enabling multicellular life to evolve and proliferate.(which seems reasonable given that the two known major multicellular radiations appear to have occurred a few million years after snowball glaciation episodes.


This is where things become difficult to assess as the rate of tidal evolution based on Earth's geological record is not consistent through Earth's evolution which exacerbates the problems of testing the model beyond the initial parameters.

For the Moon we have enough data on the evolution of the length of Earth's day to gauge that this process will likely take longer than the timescale of the Sun's main sequence lifetime to evolve towards a final Collison but as noted above tidal forces are strongly dependent on the distance of separation between two bodies

The timescale for Venus would thus require observational evidence i.e. samples of Venus to confirm or refute this hypothesis but it appears to be a feasible model which fits our current limited observations.

Skepticism is warranted however no matter how nice it may look because in science we can't let emotions or beliefs interfere with more rigorous testing.

 

[rod]

Geomartian raises the issue of catastrophism in the solar system, catastrophism that is much more recent than the commonly accepted, 4.56 billion years old solar system. Venus does indeed show this. 'Thick lithosphere casts doubt on plate tectonics in Venus's geologically recent past', https://phys.org/news/2021-01-thick-lithosphere-plate-tectonics-venus.html, 'Estimating Venusian thermal conditions using multiring basin morphology', https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01289-6, “Abstract Despite their critical roles in Venus’s geological evolution, neither heat flow through the Venusian lithosphere nor the corresponding tectonic regime in its geological past is well constrained."

My observation. The 0.3 billion years old date or 300E+6 years old impact date, suggest recent catastrophism in the solar system using the 4.56E+9 years old meteorite age paradigm. Even an impact date of 1E+9 years old is much younger and points to catastrophism operating in the solar system, recent past.

'Saturn's tilt caused by its moons', https://phys.org/news/2021-01-saturn-tilt-moons.html, 'The large obliquity of Saturn explained by the fast migration of Titan', https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01284-x, “Abstract The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane..." The age collapsed from 4 billion years ago to 1 billion years ago or perhaps less.

My observation. It is apparent that Saturn and ring age problem, can be much younger than the 4.5 billion years old solar system model based upon meteorite ages.

 

[Dragrath]

Geomartian raises the issue of catastrophism in the solar system, catastrophism that is much more recent than the commonly accepted, 4.56 billion years old solar system. Venus does indeed show this. 'Thick lithosphere casts doubt on plate tectonics in Venus's geologically recent past', https://phys.org/news/2021-01-thick-lithosphere-plate-tectonics-venus.html, 'Estimating Venusian thermal conditions using multiring basin morphology', https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01289-6, “Abstract Despite their critical roles in Venus’s geological evolution, neither heat flow through the Venusian lithosphere nor the corresponding tectonic regime in its geological past is well constrained."

My observation. The 0.3 billion years old date or 300E+6 years old impact date, suggest recent catastrophism in the solar system using the 4.56E+9 years old meteorite age paradigm. Even an impact date of 1E+9 years old is much younger and points to catastrophism operating in the solar system, recent past.

'Saturn's tilt caused by its moons', https://phys.org/news/2021-01-saturn-tilt-moons.html, 'The large obliquity of Saturn explained by the fast migration of Titan', https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01284-x, “Abstract The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane..." The age collapsed from 4 billion years ago to 1 billion years ago or perhaps less.

My observation. It is apparent that Saturn and ring age problem, can be much younger than the 4.5 billion years old solar system model based upon meteorite ages.

Good points both the Saturnian system and Venus are strong evidence that there has been dynamical instability within our solar system. Another good example is the Ordovician meteor event which resulted in the destruction of the ~150 km L chondrite progenitor around 470 Ma.

In the age of much more complex models and exoplanetary systems plus the studying ancient sediments on Earth and the astrometry of GAIA revealing the full extent of close stellar encounters there is building evidence generally driving the realization that solar systems are inherently chaotic as is the galaxy at large. Stars and planets don't stay put as they can move both in or out under the right constraints.

Plus we have seen evidence of planetary scale collisions unfold around alien suns like BD +20 307 a system at least a billion years old and exoplanets that seem likely to have resulted from collisions Kepler-107c and even the cataclysmic collision that formed the apparition that was Fomalhaut b.

Also any thoughts on the possibility for a retrograde moon to trigger a collision with Venus?

 

[Geomartian]

(splitting up my answers)

Because of the higher inertial field (gravitational gradient or structure which produces the effect of inertia) generated by both the Sun and the higher orbital velocity of Venus, I don’t believe that there is a stable orbital solution for Venus. Without a stable solution no moon is possible.

The position of Earth’s Moon is not predictable beyond about 3000 years because of these same (but reduced) effects.

 

[Geomartian]

Why do people keep insisting that an impactor has to have a local origin?

According to the official narrative something like 50 to 90% of the original asteroids and planetesimals were expelled from the Solar System soon after formation. These ejected asteroids would retain the velocity of the origin stars (but their vectors would be randomized by stellar encounters). Some of the Stars near Sol have relative velocities as great as 500 kilometers per second.

Since interstellar space is vast the probability of interstellar impacts is low. However nearly all of those impacts would be at a higher velocity and produce greater damage than local impacts.

Using the worst case as an example. What kind of damage would a perfectly centered hit by a 200 kilometer diameter planetesimal impacting at 500 kilometers per second cause?

Answer: Venus would have been splattered across the Solar System.

So, something less than the worst case happened to Venus and it was turned into a molten blob. A massive Venusian impact could also throw suspicion upon Mercury’s parentage.

 

[Geomartian]

Yes, Catastrophe a lot of impacts and collisions have occurred but why are they absent from the official narrative?

Why does NASA (and space science in general) produce complex fictional narratives when the truth is so much simpler?

 

[Geomartian]

Strike the Mercury’s parentage comment. While Mercury's orbit is eccentric the surface cratering appears to make it too ancient to be the result of a Venusian impact. The shallow impact craters on Mercury (compared to the Moon) is a visible indicator for the density of Mercury . Mercury appears to be largely iron.

 

[Catastrophe]

Mercury was hit by something which stripped away most of the mantle.

Mercury is too much core. "Mercury appears to be largely iron." Correct.

Cat

 

[Catastrophe]

Something collided with Venus. I don't know what.

It was probably from within our Solar System, but not necessarily so.

Cat

 

[Catastrophe]

"Yes, Catastrophe a lot of impacts and collisions have occurred but why are they absent from the official narrative?"

Probably because there were too many of them, and we were not around to see them.

Cat

 

[rod]

FYI. There are many reports out showing asteroids and other objects with very young ages relative to the Clair Patterson age for the solar system, fixed in mid-1950s as 4.56 billion years old. Many more now since 1955 accumulated. Putting them altogether into a consolidated report remains. Example, 'New superhighway system discovered in the Solar System', https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201209094216.htm, "Summary: Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune's distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. .."
'Studying craters on asteroid Bennu shows how long it has been orbiting near Earth', https://phys.org/news/2020-10-craters-asteroid-bennu-orbiting-earth.html, "And because Bennu moved into a near-Earth orbit, those smaller craters represent the timeline of its move to the new orbit. By studying the size and depth of those craters using data from OSIRIS-Rex, the researchers were able to estimate their age—approximately 1.75 million years—which also shows how long Bennu has been in a near-Earth orbit."

'Solar eclipse measured on Mars, affects interior', https://phys.org/news/2020-09-solar-eclipse-mars-affects-interior.html, "What precise orbit data reveals Precise data on Phobos's orbit could also shed more light on the inner workings of Mars. While our moon continues to gain angular momentum and is steadily moving away from Earth, Phobos is slowing down and gradually falling back to Mars. In 30 to 50 million years, it will crash onto the planet's surface."

In my MS ACCESS DB where I keep track of various reports for young solar system objects, impact crater ages, and young asteroid dates, there is much that points to recent catastrophism across the solar system, long after the 4.56 billion years old age model

 

[Geomartian]

It appears that the realtor was a bit vague about the safety of the neighborhood in which the property (Earth) is located.

The reptiloid realtor said that a death in the family was forcing them to sell cheap before they moved to another cheaper Solar System.

I am confused by his last words. Mammals don’t have suckers.

 

[Catastrophe]

"I am confused by his last words. Mammals don’t have suckers."

Completely untrue, I assure you. We have zillions.

Cat

 

[Dragrath]

@Geomartian as for why the local origin it is true that it doesn't need to be but a local origin offers the possibility of explaining its slow retrograde rotation for a wider range of parameters.

The reason external catastrophes tend to be avoided as a preferred hypothesis lies in their additional complexity i.e. impactor parameters making it difficult to constrain them without evidence to rule out other simpler possibilities. Two good examples where catastrophic explanations have been disfavored for a long time only leaving the fringe hypothesizes category as evidence has ruled out other explanations are the giant impact hypothesis regarding our moon and more recent the slow grudging acceptance that yes Saturn's rings and moons are quite young relative to the age of the solar system.

Is it optimal no but it is human to try and peg things into boxes and the idea that solar systems are chaotic has been a difficult pill to swallow. But it also needs to be recognized that the number of tunable parameters that could allow a model to be fit to data and the amount of assumptions needed to be made to get things to match observations for a model is something to be wary of. Science is an iterative process that approaches the best answer over many iterations and evidence is critical to keeping this process well grounded.

 

[rod]

My observation. Catastrophism for Earth is generally looked upon with disdain. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin in geology and biology vs. catastrophism using Noah's Flood in those days. Coming to grips with catastrophism much later in the solar system, long after the 4.56 billion year ages accepted for meteorites is not easy for many today.

 

[Dragrath]

My observation. Catastrophism for Earth is generally looked upon with disdain. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin in geology and biology vs. catastrophism using Noah's Flood in those days. Coming to grips with catastrophism much later in the solar system, long after the 4.56 billion year ages accepted for meteorites is not easy for many today.

Yep there has been a long clash between catastrophism and uniformitarianism largely built off of clashing perspectives mixed with of course religion. This conflict makes it hard for many people particularly older generations to come to terms with how these don't appear to be mutually exclusive rather it seems our universe is a mix of both driven by dynamical chaos. I see it as a problem related to the way the human brain evolved to interpret the world around us through categorization and formalism of world views but also critically important to this issue is the whole unpleasant existential chill that comes with the realization that we are likely mainly here due to sheer luck. People tend to look for a greater reason for everything, "oh the dinosaurs were already in decline the asteroid must have just accelerated it" is still a fairly prevalent opinion despite the evidence to the contrary particularly how statistics shows that the decrease in fossils just below the K-Pg boundary is exactly what is expected given the low probability of fossilization and the highly uneven distribution of life at higher trophic levels. There is also many attempts to reduce one thing to one cause and outcome such as the many attempts to simplify all mass extinctions to Large Igneous Provinces alone despite evidence showing that the big mass extinctions seem to all have had additional factors at play distinguishing them from more minor mass extinction events. Of course the underlying reason for this is that people want to believe that our appearance was in any way inevitable that we are special or chosen rather than a fluke in a chaotic uncaring universe.